"Terrain Boards or Mats" Topic

I am looking for any and all information on terrain boards and terrain mats whether homemade or from a company. Need to get terrain started for solo gaming.

Thanks

wow

TMP link

You might start here.
What scale are you doing? I'd recommend the mat myself unless you want to do something really specific.

I would go with HOTZ Mats, they do a nice European field cloth.

link

Depending on the scale but we have a few mats that work for ground games. These are scaled to 6mm but work for 15mm.

corseceng.com/fabric-mats/river

link

Jonathan Bowen
CorSec Engineering

My terrain tiles to suit all my wargames needs:

link

Cheers, Michael

If you want to get into the game fast and cheap the Citadel BattleMat works quite nice: link It is made up of tiny blades of multicolored grass, rolls up, and comes 6' x 4' in size. I bought some plywood strips 4' x 2' and after putting down a foam pad to protect my dining room table I can add the plywood to make a battlefield 4 x 6 feet or 4 by 9 feet (with a second mat added. It is a great short turn solution and beats green felt. The plywood also is easy to store because it is in small sections. I just use a few strategicly placed strips of masking tape to hold the sections together when I play.

The most versatile method is to use mats over various shapes/foam pieces and then customize the game sheet. I use chalk pastels and can do just about anything that way. I have a greeish, sheet a brownish sheet and a whitish sheet for all seasons or ground colors. It is also easy to set up anywhere. I run most games now in a game shop on a flat 4X6 table.
A lot easier than doing terrain boards and you're not stuck storing them somehow.

Link to setting up a Normandy table:
link
Lots of other tables and games:
link

I do 15mm and 6mm games using the same method.
Mark

Kallistra's Hexon II:
kallistra.co.uk/?page=8

Oh great, I just re-built my 4X8 table and was going with modular boards until I saw Marks' stuff. Thanks a lot!

Wow Mark, that looks like a great setup. how did you make the mats or where did you get them?

The mats are just cheap bed sheets-no need for Egyptian cotton here. They are dyed with standard fabric dyes- Rite is common enough. This is enough to get their basic color. I then use cheap spray paint from the hardware shop or Home Depot/Lowe's to deepen the colors in areas.
The chalk pastels can be mostly washed out. If there are some obvious lines after washing, I use spray paint to cover those up before the next game.
After a few years the sheets take on a nice patina that looks more and more like earth and fields

Interesting discussion. I am considering a major revamp of my 12 x 6 table for Waterloo in a couple of years, and was considering the Total System Scenic from the UK. But the postage to Aus, now calculated by volume, would more than double the price!

Now looking at Back to Basix' self assembly magnetic tile system instead…I'm not very hands on, but these do look doable, and could be used to reflect the undulating nature of the terrain far better than my current cloth…

I also like Kallistra's Hexon see; link
Also I have made my own terrain boards for my Boxtel game; link and link

Regards

Garry Wills

Here's another method using premade terrain mats for model railroads plus some cheap wooden rulers. The look is similar to Mark's fields, but not nearly as impressive, though probably a bit quicker to put together.

link

tshryock-

Adding the moss on there definitely makes those rulers look good. I may try something like that for my 3mm stuff..

Microbiggie-
I didn't know you had so many pics of your stuff out there! Looks great. I may try that out when I do my next set of fields and mats. Spraying the secondary fields down seems like a good way to save time and money. I just have to find a way to do fences in 3mm now….

I would consider doing a mat like Mark's if I could figure out a realistic way to replicate rivers. Just can't stand the sit on top rivers and roads with mats. The chalk looks good for roads but does it come off onto miniatures? The sunken railroad would do for a river but what would one put inside to replicate the water?

Yeah alright

That looks pretty good.

I like it a lot

F

@ Sparker

I think you will find the terrain tiles from B2B pretty easy to get a handle on Ralph, I have a few ideas that seemed to work as far as hills etc go couple with the different height tiles with outcomes similar to those of WeeWar. The magnets do a great job and they really do hold the tiles together. I'm sold on 'em

link

regards
dave

I use a couple of different methods for water and rivers. Both involve placing material on the sheet. Simple method is thin plastic cut into strips or shapes. Painted suitable colors and then heavily gloss coated. For some more tranquil bodies of water I add flocking to the still wet gloss coats. I spray glue these down also.

link

link

I've also used plastic trash bags sprayed in water colors and then glued onto the sheet. This requires the water to be cut around the edges to get the right shape. Works best if you can throw some rocks and debris out on the water feature also to hide any mistakes.

link

link

Mark's stuff is absolutely beautiful and, inspired by him, I've tried to do it myself. I quickly found that I'm lacking in the requisite talent. You can see the results here:

link

One problem with Mark's system is that you need a lot of space to store all the foam bits – as much as modules, actually – plus it takes forever to set up and break down. And, of course, you have to have talent at drawing and shading with pastels.

The new system I'm using is this one here…

link

It's a flocked foamie, green on one side, yellow on the other. Terrain features are painted/flocked on canvases, cut out, then pinned down by thumbtacks with bits of flocking on them to make them look like bushes.

6 foamies make the base – easy to store. A couple of small boxes hold all the canvas bits and another couple of boxes hold buildings trees and the like.

It's easy to set up and take down, easy to transport and – while not as nice as Mark's set up – pretty good looking, too.

That new system looks pretty good to me.
Mark

Still nowhere near as nice as yours, MArk. If I had a stable and large dwelling, I"d go your route, even though it requires more prep time and talent.

It did take a while for me to get the system down, but it is pretty easy for me to set up a game now. I actually set it up twice-once in my basement to get everything in order and mark up the sheet. I then take that down and throw it in the car to set up again at the shop. So it does store easily. It usually takes about 30 minutes to set up at the shop.
Thanks for the comments.
Mark

Mark, you are a genius mate. Some of those terrain pics are just incredible. Those bocage hedgerows on flat sticks would cost you £10.00 GBP a piece commercially. And that last photo in your bocage pics selection could have been taken by a recce Spitfire or marauding Typhoon it was so effective.

I'm really tempted to give it a try. The permanent marking of roads on a mastic based mat had me hesitating, but you have managed to get round that issue brilliantly with the use of pastels and a washing machine!

I presume the bocage game was 6mm?

Keep us posted on new developments.

I can foresee a number of these madeup with ready to roll out Napoleonic battlefields with field details painted/sprayed/glued on…… for the price of a cheap sheet and a bit of weekend diy. Great stuff.
tthanks for sharing.

TMP link

There's a pic of the one I did a ways down. It's a hybrid of Marks and Warartisan's technique.

There's a really easy way to make contrasting fields especially if you're using the smaller scales. Take a few bags of flock and mix them into different shades, say one dark, one light and one medium- make sure these are different shades from whatever you've picked out for the primary mat. So if you're main mat is more yellowish make these green, brown, etc.

Take some additional cloth and flock these using brown latex and the different shades of flock you've mixed. When these are dry cut from them whatever shapes you want for your fields. Latex rubber cuts very neatly with scissors, so this is pretty easy.

Also, Mark, I'm going to be trying out your stick idea tonight but with entire forests.The sticks will be the edge of the forest and the space in the middle I'll fill however works best. I'll try to post some pics…

The latest game I did was a Reichswald scenario, so I broke out my old foam and lichen blocks of thick woods and resprayed them dark green. I use foam furniture padding for the base and glue lichen and small foam scaps on top and side then spray paont the mess.

link

The nice thing about using foamies (like me) or foam underbedding (like Mark) is that you can pin the small terrain features in place, either by having pins built into these or by using flocked stick pins.

This is very important at the small scales and PARTICULARLY so at 3mm if you don't want your terrain tumbling over or migrating.

Very inspirational thread. Thanks for posting chaps.

@Microbiggie what did you use for the board base?

Pinmping my gaming craft site:

inlgames.com

The Idea of the Week frequently has terrain. The archive has a collection of them.

Marcus,
There is no board base. I just put the terrain sheet-cheap bed sheets, on any surface. Any elevations are made undeer the sheet with suitable objects. I use styrofoam sheets cut and stacked to make hills.
Mark

Macunaima,

What was the process to flock the foam boards? Did you paint them first or just glue on the flock?

Build your own. Not as hard as it might look -

Waterloo Board
link
(For how the Waterloo board was built, go to lshmwaco.org, click "Photos", click "Building a 3D scale . . .")

Gettysburg Board
link

WWI Trench Board
link

Rorke's Drift Board
link

link

I just happened upon this tutorial today. This is a cheaper and seemingly faster way to do one of these things than I've found myself. I especially like using the plane white acrylic stuff instead of the latex. Latex caulk is sort of expensive….

well inspired by these I went out at the weekend and bought a canvas sheet and some caulk.

however I do like the look and ease of doing it with the acrylic stuff too – wish I knew where I could source it here in Australia.

"Flexible Modeling Paste" works great over fiber board.